Rooting for Russia

For the national conservatives, V. Putin's victory equals their vindication

To Russia with love: three faces of national conservatism

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America’s national conservatives—natcons for short—have made a considerable investment in a Russian victory over Ukraine. They espouse a theory of geopolitics in which America is a decadent, corrupt, declining power, incapable of winning wars or doing anything right. Indeed, they see America’s global role as the focus of evil in the modern world. This being the case, the natcons consider a Russian victory over Ukraine to be not only inevitable but essential: It’s what they need to validate their world view. But if Russia should happen to lose? The natcons would be proved wrong, and nobody likes that.

Thus their hateful, negative view of America is mirror imaged in the natcon fantasy of V. Putin as a soulful Russian patriot, opposing a robust Christian nationalism to the sterile, grasping globalism of the decadent West. In this telling, Russia is the victim of “NATO aggression,” and V. Putin’s brutal act of aggression against Ukraine is a legitimate measure of self-defense. As it happens, I have a sample of this b.s ready to hand in the form of a reply to a comment that I made recently on The Free Press’s always readable “TGIF” feature. In response to my commonsense observation that the United States is not actually fighting in Ukraine but merely providing that country with military assistance, I got this comeback:

And what do you know about attrition? The Wehrmacht found out about attrition in the winter of 1943. I am talking about western industrial output and societal dissaray and decadence. Everyone knows we are finished. Meanwhile, because of our Hubris, more than 15 million civilians of Ukrain are in exile, mainly women and children. The men are all being drafter and turned to cannon fodder. At least half the Ukrain population opposes the Kiev regime and supports moscow. They are russian speaking and is locate in Chrimia and Donbas. This also has most of Ukraines heavy industry. The only way Zaliniskies side can win an election is by not counting the Russian speaking vote. The exiled women and children of Ukrain will never be going home unless there is a peace deal soon. Their men are being killed. They fight but they have few real resources except what we give them. They cannot continue without our massive continuous support, just like in Afghanistan, and Vietnam and with the rest of our so called allies. But we are not limitless in our power. There is an end to how long we can support a war that is unwinnable. Even at this early stage our regional banks and even central European banks are failing and our brit and french and italian and nordic allies are hemorrhaging cash and cutting their welfare states and medical services. The weakest citizens are thrown to the dogs. We simply cannot make enough high explosive shells and we cannot replace losses of trucks and drones and medicine and food and fuel. Forget the supply of young slavic farmboy draftees thrown into combat to be cannon fodder. We will fight those ruskies till the last Ukrainian dies. Real tough guys we are. Then, when they start to lose, we will betray them and run for the exit, the same as we did in Iraq and afghanistani and Syria and Kurdistan and Solamlia and Libya and and and....

Notice how thoroughly this rant inverts reality. Cannon fodder? The man who’s shoveling that commodity into the battle is the odious V. Putin. But my natcon interlocutor would have you believe that it’s the people of Ukraine who are being unwillingly driven into battle—by the sinister forces of Western imperialism. The possibility that they’ve been aroused to a heroic resistance in the face of an invasion by a feared and hated enemy is something that he refuses to accept; it would falsify his entire belief system.

Now you may say that by selecting this specimen of natcon rhetoric, I’ve plucked low-hanging fruit. Well, yes, admittedly, the ideas expressed above are crude to the point of caricature. But I didn’t make them up. And I think it’s fair to say that if presented less hysterically, they’d accurately represent the natcon position—for instance, the claim that for Ukraine and the West, the war is “unwinnable.”

In support of this contention, my interlocutor slaps down what he supposed to be the old reliable trump card of military analysis: attrition. He claims, in effect, that Russia possesses sufficient resources, human and material, to wear down the Ukrainians and exhaust the patience of the West. In witness whereof, he cites the Nazi-Soviet War, supposedly a textbook example of victory by attrition.

When one thinks of attrition, however, the example that first comes to mind is the Western Front, 1914-18. And while it’s not true that most of the battles fought in that time and place were purely attritional in concept, it is true that attrition was conscripted as a substitute for the failure of many Franco-British offensives to produce the promised results. When the offensives at Loos, the Somme, Flanders, etc. misfired, the excuse was made that anyhow, the Germans had been dealt a major blow, suffering more casualties than the Allied armies. Usually this was not the case, though it is true that the Battle of the Somme in 1916 shook the German Army badly. On the whole, however, it was “attrition on the wrong side of the balance sheet,” as the crisp summary of B.H. Liddell Hart had it.

The prime example of a deliberately planned Great War battle of attrition is Germany’s Verdun offensive (1916). The French Army would be bled white by forcing it to defend a position of symbolic importance, whose abandonment would be seen as a decisive defeat. But the German strategy was too clever by half; as things turned out, the defense of Verdun became an epic of heroic resistance that facilitated the rise of Philippe Pétain, who as Commander-in-Chief was to lead the French Army through crisis to victory.

On the Eastern Front in World War II, attrition had a similarly doubtful record. While it’s true that the German Army suffered a preponderance of its total casualties in battle against the Red Army, this was not an isolated phenomenon. It occurred in the context of a global war, the USSR being in alliance with two other major powers. But without the Grand Alliance, if the USSR been compelled to fight National Socialist Germany alone, it would probably have been defeated. My article, “Forge of Victory: Myths and Realities of Russia's Great Patriotic War for the Motherland” covers this subject in more detail. Here, it suffices to say that there was much more involved in J.V. Stalin’s victory over Adolf Hitler than simple attrition.

In the present case, it seems to me dubious that V. Putin can win his war by feeding his own army into the mincing machine. The claim that Russia can afford to suffer more casualties than Ukraine is a speculative premise at best. It relies on simple arithmetic, disregarding the psychological and moral dimension of war. Is it really true that the Russian people will rest content with a strategy that piles up Russian corpses? Is it really true that Russia’s resources, human and material, are so much greater than Ukraine’s as to make victory certain? Is it really true that the West will eventually tire of the war and allow Ukraine to be subjugated?

The natcons answer all three questions in the affirmative—not because they’re smarter than everybody else but because their arguments are the rationalization of a heartfelt wish. The truth is that they desire V. Putin’s victory because it would vindicate their ideology of anti-American nationalism.